Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 146: LISTENER CALLS: A Revolution is Coming in Knowledge Work

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Below are the topics covered in today's listener calls mini-episode (with timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.A conversation with Producer Jesse about my next book [1:48]LISTENER CALLS:- Twitter FOMO for a journalist. [16:40]- Tracking small amounts of time. [25:12]- My quarterly planning process. [30:07]- Tedious tasks with an entry level job. [34:22]- Timeblock planners spiral bindings. [38:24]- Struggling to balance teaching with research (PLUS: a bonus rant about the coming knowledge work revolution). [42:15]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This show is sponsored by Optimize, an online network dedicated to helping you live a deeper life. When you sign up for Optimize, you get access to over 600 philosophers' notes. These are best-in-the-business summaries of some of the most important nonfiction books ever written. You also get access to over 50 101 video masterclasses on some of these big ideas, including one that I taught called Digital Minimalism 101, and you get a daily plus one email that takes one big idea from this corpus, presents it to you in a accessible video, and then links below to the Philosopher's Notes you can follow

for the books from which that knowledge was extracted. I've been talking about Optimize on this podcast for a while because I'm good friends with Brian Johnson, the founder and Mad Monk CEO of the company, but today I have very exciting news. Optimize is now free. You can sign up at Optimize.com. No strings attached, no credit card, no monthly fee.

It's just free. You can just join and be a part of that network. And right away, immerse yourself in this knowledge to help your life become deeper, so there's no reason not to try it. Go to Optimize.combe today and create your free account. I'm Cal Newport. This is Deep Questions. Episode 146.

So for the first, whatever it's been now, more than a year that I have been recording this podcast, I've often just been alone here in the Deep Work HQ talking to the walls, which is why an exciting development is that I now have someone here with me. I have Jesse, who has been helping me recently actually get this. media company up and running, keep the wheels on the car, keep the oil change, keep the podcast coming out,

let's get videos going, lots of other help that I desperately need. He's here now. He is joining me in the studio. Jesse, hello. Hello, great to be here. Very excited about it.

Let me ask you this. Disappointment or exceeded expectations when you were able to see the actual inside of the Deepwork HQ? You 100% exceeded expectations. I've been a listener of your podcast for the very beginning, and you explain a lot of the stuff that you were building and creating here. So I had a decent idea what it was going to look like and what you had, but overall,

exceeded expectations. It's a cool place. I like this idea that I've convinced people that there's a Willy Wonka type focus-induced Wonderworld in here, which I should have done, but I think then you would have been disappointed, because this is like Willie Wonka's factory if there was a lot more empty coffee cups and a lot of old lights, old lights from studio configuration sitting around. But otherwise, similar. Similar. All right.

So here's what I wanted to ask you about, Jesse. As you know, I'm working on books. I'm not writing right now. This fall, my writerly attentions are focused on the column I'm writing for the New Yorker. But I would like to be bookwriting again by the new year. So I can have a head of steam going into the summer where I have a lot of time to. right. And as I've announced on the podcast, one of the books that I'm working on a proposal for is a book on the deep life, but I'm still working on that proposal. I'm still malleable.

I can still be convinced to go one direction versus another. So let me pick your brain on behalf of other listeners. If all you know is that it's a book, I'm writing it, it's about the deep life. What do you want in that book? Well, I've been a big fan of your podcast since the very beginning. I've read it. I read half of your books, read a majority of your articles, at least in the last three or four years on your website. And some of the stuff that you says always resonate with me in terms of having a balanced life, reading a lot of books, having some sort of discipline and organization in your approach to work, and that sort of stuff like that. And the slow productivity theme that you've been talking about lately, I find it very, it appeals to me when I deal with that for both work, personal, and even like my training life in terms of working out and keeping your mind right in that sort of capacity. So in terms of the deep life, I'm a coach at heart too.

I coach some sports. So I would love to see some sort of, I know you do a lot of deep dives into case studies of certain people. I would love to see a case study of a coach or a athlete or something like that that puts a lot of that preparation and whatnot into their craft and also balances it. That just has a good balance of it all and isn't. It's interesting. Something like that. Right. Coach or an athlete.

So when we're thinking about the balance between the journalistic in a book like this, so like let's, which I want to do some of, like, let's get into this person's story, right? Let's get into their life. Let's make this real.

And then there's all the, the systematic stuff I do. You know, here are, here are buckets and keystone habits or this or that. I'm struggling with this. How do I balance between those two? Because I mean,

I'm thinking this can't be a super how toy type book. because the topic is too, I don't know, philosophical or lofty, but it can't just be completely just a mood-based book. Look at these people living a deep life. How important, what are you thinking about the specific systems I talk about when it comes to the deep life? And your impression of this topic, I mean, how much of it is kind of conveying the paths or elements of the deep life versus the systems? I don't know. I can't figure this out.

you've talked about in the past and I just heard you talk about it recently where you have a you had a question talking about the physical and the digital components of living a deep life where the physical where your moleskin notebooks your things where you do more deep slow thinking your contemplative work whereas the digital tools you use want that's when you want to like maximize speed and get things done quickly whether it's seeing what task is next or whatever you're going to do next. So you've talked about that a little bit in the past in terms of using like some of the processes that help you live a deeper life. And I think more elaboration of that would be really interesting in terms of how there is that balance because I think a lot of people get bogged down in productivity, productivity, productivity, and they're using all these tasks, getting all these notifications and just bombard it with all this stuff.

and they never take the time to separate from that sort of thing and read a book, write a couple pages in a journal entry, go for a walk and just contemplate about certain things. That's interesting. It's really important, and I think that most people, I mean, people in general need to be coached on a daily basis. Athletes need to be coached all the time. People need to be reminded all the time about that sort of thing.

So it would be kind of, it might be building on something like that. That's interesting. Actually, you know, I hadn't thought about that, but I think it's right. Like, there needs to be something in there about building a life. There's depth every day. There's a contemplative part to it. There's a slowness. It's not just about the big picture. Reset. It's not just a big picture. Like, I switched to this job and moved to this cabin by the water and have completely reconfigured what I'm doing in my life. there's also the reconfiguring what your day looks like. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, you know, I hadn't thought about that before.

I'll tell you, I was thinking before this was, I've had more trouble with this book proposal than most I've ever worked on. I'm just completely rewrite it again and again because I can't quite, I love the topic so much that I feel that I am not going to do it justice. So I get, it's not it. And now I have a version in which there's paths, four common paths towards the deep life. So we can spend some time looking at this particular path like escape and this path, which is based around mastery and, and, you know, really try to take these paths towards the deep life and break it down into its components and understand the pieces of it.

And so how could you then rebuild a deep life around one of these paths? But I'm increasingly convinced that maybe the book needs to be part one paths, part two foundations or something like this. part one is like, okay, here are the different templates for a deep life and its elements and why they're important, how you might rebuild your life around it. Part two is a little more ditty gritty, like how you actually, you know, how you figure these things out, how you structure your day, keeping track of the buckets, like trying to actually throw some systematic type whatever at the book as well. So both is in there. The sort of Michael Pollan style, let me go to Polyphase Farms and you come away wanting to buy grass, fed meat. And then at the other end, sort of, I guess I say, Cal Newport style, I have a moleskin in which I check it every month and then I keep track of these notes here. Yeah,

probably have to have both. Well, your books in the past have followed a similar format where you've had two parts or multiple parts. I know your student books have, your most recent book has. And that, I think, is very useful. I liked it when I read it. I think one of the things, the overall thing that you might need to address or think about when you're writing your proposal is because you talk about slow productivity a lot, you're extremely productive yourself and you're doing a lot of things. So it's a way to explain how you approach this slow productivity with having a family, with having multiple jobs, with having outside events of people wanting your attention.

Yeah, but you got to recognize I do too many things. As part of the reason why I'm developing slow productivity as a concept is so that I can apply it to myself. It is me trying to figure out a coherent life philosophy that involves 50% of what I'm doing right now. It really is coming out of conversations with my coach. You know, like, yeah, I need to rain in that and rain in this. and easier said than done. So I think I say you're going to have to explain why you're talking about slow productivity

when your life is not bad. And that's a fair question, actually. Well, in a way, you do practice a lot of the slow productivity elements. So I think if you were to compare what you do compared to somebody else who might be like a really busy lawyer or something like that who's just always on the phone, working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, never dispel. I mean, you have elements in your life.

where you have the slow productivity game plan in place. So I think even that would be beneficial, because I think you do a lot of stuff. You want to pare it down you're talking about, but you still live some of the elements of slow productivity that I think other really, really busy people would like to implement and see how you do that in order to create sanity

and make sure that you're mentally in a good place. It's like chapter four, hire Jesse. that's going to be one of the that'll be one of the chapters in the book I just get a lot of the stuff from from your stuff to be quite honest that I've implemented it in what I do and I don't

I don't have a family yet or have kids running around which is a whole other element that I totally understand would require a lot of extra organization but yeah I would I would think that having the systems with the

the systems that optimize things with the overall message of taking a step back and thinking what you talk about a time and reading and getting other ideas would help build any person's career or personal life or whatever it is. And I think I really come back to, because I always resonate, I mean, I'm going to say it again, but the training stuff, I mean, if you're looking to get stronger, if you're looking to get faster, like you talk about it all the time doing either, you know, physical work in the gym or mental pushups for your brain. that stuff needs to continually be coached.

And I think that that's like one of the things that I like reading about and listening about all the times. Like when you have you've had, you were on Lex Friedman's podcast and I didn't really know who he was until you were on it. And then I listened to went through some of his stuff. And he has like a lot of interviews with some of the training guys. Those are my favorite ones on his stuff like that. Do you hear that, Lex, by the way? He found the podcast. because I was on it.

So I'm taking your 400,000 downloads an episode. I'm taking credit for like three of those. So, yeah, stuff like that, I think it really resonated. Because, I mean, the other thing, the other thing that you might want to consider that I would at least want to answer to is how it resets every day. I mean, you have certain systems in place that make sure you're at a baseline level. but each day it kind of resets, especially, you know, when we just came off like the time that our whole world was in with like the pandemic and stuff and, you know, people's anxiety up and people just not used to doing things the normal way. And you need to like reset yourself mentally a lot of times to make sure you're sane. And I think a lot of the stuff that you talk about, like allows that to happen.

Yeah. So what I'm getting out of this, which is good for me to comment. contemplate is there's two scales for the deep life potentially. There's the big scale, which is what you are doing. Like, what's my job? Where do I live? You know, what are my main pursuits to which I dedicate time? And then there's the small scale elements of the deep life, which is how are you shaping how you live on Thursday? How are you shaping what your week looks like? I mean, how do you make sure that, you know, day to day it is a life that's compatible with depth? And I actually hadn't thought about it that way before, but it's good.

good because it's that small scale often that really can snag people and get them thinking like, okay, I can ride away have more depth than my life. Basically, if you can get people sitting by the lake riding in their moleskin on day one, you're probably much more likely on day 300 for them to have a transformed life. It's a sustainable meaning. So, all right, I appreciate that. Thank you, Jesse. This is actually the first book that I am starting from scratch in the,

era of my podcast. So maybe I'll keep checking in. I think it might be interesting to actually you as the listeners can hear as I work on this book as I conceive it, as I sell it, as I research it, as I write it can keep you posted on how it comes together. I thought that might be interesting. I don't know if I've heard that before. Writers actually walking through their book as they work on it, but I'm thinking about doing it. If you have thoughts, listeners, interesting at calnewport.com where you can call in a call to speakpipe.com and I'm very interested right now on what people have to say.

And I will say I should point out, by the way, Jesse being here in the studio raises the average physical fitness of people in the headquarters by a factor of three. So I think we're doing well. If we talk about like the average bench press

or squat weight, I think that just jumped up a lot of people who are in this building right now. So that's good. All right. Jesse, thank you. And let's do some calls. Hi, Cal. My name is Teresa, and I work as a journalist and editor for a niche industry

publication in the Midwest. Before the pandemic, I would spend up to two hours of my workday on Twitter, thinking it helped me stay on top of the news in my industry and help me generate story ideas. But in reality, it was mostly to pass the time while I was sitting at a desk from eight to five. After reading your books and listening to your podcasts, I decided to use my work from home opportunity to develop new habits. So I decided to quit Twitter. Now I only use Facebook to keep informed of my daughter's school announcements and my favorite local businesses I choose to support. The problem is, now that I'm back to the office, I feel like I'm behind my colleagues who are still on Twitter and getting story ideas from the chatter among those of us in our industry. My question is, how do I overcome the fear of missing out as a journalist and still stay up to date on news in my industry without using Twitter and social media?

Thanks, Cal, and I really appreciate your podcast and all of your advice. Well, I appreciate this question. I actually had this debate with Ezra Klein in one of the appearances I did on his show. I remember arguing with him about the necessity of him when he was the editor of Vox actually being on Twitter or not to keep up with the news. And it was a spirited debate, which is to say if you're actually in a job where you want to keep up with what's going on, it's not an obvious issue. I would say a couple things here. First of all, I do applaud you for quitting Twitter. I think Twitter is basically like a reverse anxiety drug.

So instead of taking Paxil to feel like you have less anxiety, you're taking anti-Paxil to make your anxiety really go up. It really is terrible for mental health, especially in our current climate. So let's start with that as probably being good and see if we can figure out how to go forward without it. I also want to mention, however, as an aside, this observation you had that pre-pandemic, you were really using Twitter to fill the time.

It's a really important observation. And it's why I really recommend time block planning, especially if you're going to be working in an office where you are making a plan for what you want to do with your time. What's the best things to do with your time? If you're time block planning, you're not going to kill time. You either are going to find more or additional productive things to do or you're going to be able to put. large intentional breaks into your day. And you could use these breaks to make progress on other projects or to learn about other things.

We've talked about this before. You can do it in a way that your employer won't be upset. So I really don't like the idea of killing time informally. Schedule what you want to do. Make the most out of the time when you don't want to be working. Time block planning helps you do it. All right, let's get back to trying to stay up on the news. I have to imagine in whatever industry it is that you cover, there is a way to stay up on

what matters in the news without having to just watch the ill thought through small tweet character count messages going by in that feed. There's just so much that's toxic that happens on Twitter. It just hits this way of interacting that presses all the buttons. It's so quick to be annoyed or upset or mean, pseudo-anonymous. I mean, the whole thing is a mess. There has to be a way.

There has to be a way that you can stay up on news without having to just be there on Twitter. So maybe there's email newsletters, there's podcasts, there's websites, there's honest-to-god physical newspapers. Depending what the medium is, find other ways that you can ritualize to expose yourself to what's going on in that world. Hold the line if you can against getting back on Twitter. I mean, honestly, if I was a reporter, this is what I suggested to Ezra, like I would rather hire someone whose job it was three times a day to go into a Twitter account we set up for them with a clear list of the type of things I care about, what, what, qualifies as breaking news I need to know about. And they can call me if they see something.

Because you know what? They're going to find something once a month. And once a month is not worth spending three hours a day lost in that morass of anxiety producing nonsense. So find a way not to be on Twitter, especially if you know that you're prone to falling down that rabbit hole, especially if you know you're prone to start to using that as just anxiety producing time killing. There's other ways to stay up to date on the world with a little bit of effort.

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I will admit to understand exactly how this product work, but once I tried it, it really is one of the best tasting cups of coffee I've ever brewed in my own home. So if you like coffee at all, this is something that you have to taste a belief. So go tocom slash deep to save $20 on your first order. A new day has arrived on earth for coffee. And you can find out more atcommitere.com slash eat Hey cow I have a question about metric tracking I have been tracking deep work metrics

day by day in my time block planner based on the number of hours I'm working but I'm finding that hours is not a granular enough metric some mornings I might work one hour on a project and other mornings I might work an hour and a half and I'm finding that the 30 minutes really makes a big difference in how much I accomplish but that it's hard to kind of track

because I am using the tallies, and so I can only track an integral number of hours worked. Tracking minute by minute seems potentially too granular that I shouldn't really care whether I work 20 or 21 minutes because it might require a stopwatch or something like that. And so I'm wondering, how should I go about tracking deep work time in my time block planner? What is too granular? What is not granular enough? And how should I differentiate between 60 and 90 minutes of work? on a given day.

Well, there's two things at play here. How to track time, like what granularity to track time at, and then the bigger question of should you track time, should you track how much time specifically you've spent on different projects? So if we go to the first question, let's assume we want to track time on a given project. Let's say we want to track deep work time or whatever it is you're trying to track. The right granularity is probably 30-minute increments because that's the granularity, the smallest granularity of the time block planner.

You have hour-long blocks that are split into 30-minute sub-blocks. And so that was typically the granularity on which I would track. The way I would actually capture that when I was doing deep work tallies, if it ended up on a 30-minute multiple, like it ended up on three and a half hours, I would draw a hash mark that was half the height of the other ones. So you could actually have a half. Now, one of the nice things about time block planning is you should,

format different blocks different ways. So let's say what you want to tabulate is how long you spent on deep work, right? You should, like I do, for example, I color in a deep border, a thick border around my deep work block. So now when I glance at my schedule, I can actually just see visually how much deep work did I do that day. Oh, there was a two hour block here and a 30 minute block there. It almost makes putting the metrics redundant, though it is nice to kind of have a number up there. So that's the other thing I would recommend. The bigger point I want to make, however,

is that I find myself doing less hour tracking of that type, less so than I used to. It used to be one of my main metrics was deep work hours. I wanted to see how much of it I was doing. Multi-scale planning, when embraced fully, makes that also a little bit unnecessary. So if you have a vision that informs a quarterly plan, that informs your weekly plan and that weekly plan then informs your daily plan,

you're putting aside the right amount of time for those things for that week. You were doing that during the weekly planning process. It's when you have a book you're working on. You're looking at your week and figuring out when do I actually want to work on that book. I want to spend all day, Tuesday morning because that's free and then I'm going to do an hour after work on Thursday, an hour after work on Friday. Whatever it is, you're making a plan that makes the most sense for the reality of your schedule and for what's actually important on your plate. And then when you get to each day, you're using that weekly plan to build your actual time block plan. I find when I'm really leaning into multi-scale planning, I don't really need to know how many hours of deep work that I do. That's an important leading indicator if you're not giving a lot of thought to how your week is going to shape up. So it's a inducement. Hey, make sure you get deep work hours in if you can because you want that number to be not too small. And I get that. But the next level of sophistication I found is that when you really trust yourself to go from vision to quarter to week to day, you gave a lot of thought to what the right amount of deep work is.

And if you're actually executing your daily plans, that work is getting executed. So you don't also need to track it because guess what? Some weeks you're going to have much smaller amount of deep work than others. Some weeks are going to be really leaning into something logistical. Other weeks, the whole thing will be dedicated to deep work. And the individual number might not be that important. So that's the bigger point I want to make here is I do like tracking deep work hours. I used to do that, but I don't anymore because if you're doing multi-scale planning properly,

you don't need to be forcing yourself or inducing yourself or motivating yourself to do work with those particular metrics. Really, the only metric that matters is, did I follow my plan? Did I look at my weekly plan and actually build out and follow a time block plan? So maybe that will alleviate some of the concern you're having about accurately capturing all the different places, do deep work. If you trust your plan, you can trust that you're getting the right amount of work done. Hi, Cal. This is Ryan. I'm a software engineer in Portland, Oregon, and I wanted to get a deeper understanding of your quarter planning process. Specifically, what are the steps you go through and how long does it take overall? And finally, what does your quarter plan look like in the end?

I ask because I feel I spend way too much time doing it, probably three plus. less hours. And then I end up getting a little bit too specific, like down into the details that would be more appropriate for a week plan rather than a quarter plan. So being able to just compare what I'm doing against what you're doing would be a great help. I also have a follow-up question. Do you do quarter reviews when you're done? Kind of look back on your quarter and compare the progress you made versus what your quarter plan looks. look like, maybe do time audits, stuff like that. I'd love to get the details on that as well.

Thank you. Well, quarterly planning is an interesting beast because it can cover a lot of different things. I typically put aside a weekend when I'm working on my quarterly plans. Now, it doesn't mean that I am working eight hours on Saturday and eight hours of a Sunday working on my quarterly plan. It's more that I want a little bit of space, a little bit more space than normal to think, a little bit more space.

to reflect. And so I'll go on walks. It'll be in the back of my mind while I'm mowing the yard or working on the house. And usually my idea is by the end of that weekend, I'm ready to start working out my plan for the new quarter. I don't get very granular. So I'll talk about, you know, I want to make progress on this paper. I want my book proposal at this stage by the end of it. This is where I want the empire to be. That's one of my facetious insider terms for all the media I produce. This is where I'd like this to be by December. This is where I'd like this to be by May.

That's pretty high granularity. So it's figuring out those targets. Okay, what takes more time is often I'm putting in place some sort of initiative that I want to try during that quarter. It might be a new approach to reducing my schedule footprint. It might be a new approach to increasing my physical fitness. There's usually something I'm captioning there, sometimes multiple things. It might be a set of goals I want to hit before I get to a birthday, for example.

Okay, I'm about to turn 40. I want to get to XYZ. What is XYZ? So it's really these goals, these plans, these initiatives that I'm often working out that takes some time. I want to think through, okay, what is it that I'm working on this quarter to improve myself beyond just what are my work goals, right? And that can take some time to work out. Then I am constantly reflected on this because I'm seeing this quarterly plan every week. I'm seeing it every week because I'm building a weekly plan where I look first at my quarterly plan.

There's no notion of I get to the end of the quarter and say, huh, I wonder how this went. You know really well how it went because you've been trying to execute this thing week after week. And the reality of that is that you end up making a lot of tweaks. You're looking at your plan. You're executing. You're looking at your plan. You're executing. You take things off.

You add things. You change your ambition over here, maybe reducing it. But on this initiative, you increase it. So you're really deeply intertwined with your quarterly. ambitions as you go through the more quotidian, I should say, day to day. And so by the time you get to the end of the quarter, you know exactly what happened. How did it go? What worked?

What didn't? Where you are? What you fell short on? What really made you feel good? And so when you do your next weekend, when you do your next, let me think about the quarter ahead. You have all that intelligence there. You don't really have to go and extract it.

So that's what I would recommend. Give yourself some thinking time before you put together your next quarterly plan. And then don't be afraid of getting your hands dirty throughout that quarter, adjusting, tweaking, working on that quarterly plan as it unfolds. All of that review is going to then be happening in real time. You'll end that quarter knowing very well what worked and what didn't. Hi, Cal. I love your books and writing and everything. I'm an entry-level recent college grad, and because of that, I have to do a lot of mindless, repetitive

tasks that don't necessarily require deep concentration but are very tedious and leave me tired afterwards with little ability to then go and do deep work. So I was wondering how you think I should structure my day or any other tips to get through this. Thanks. Well, entry-level jobs often don't require much deep work. And the goal, therefore, is to continue to advance until you get to a place where deep work becomes a bigger part of your job. And this is not because deep work has some sort of intrinsic value to it. It's just that deep work by definition is where you are applying hard-won skills to try to add value to information, right? So your job is going to be more rare and valuable, the more that you're actually doing that.

So you want to get to a place where now I'm applying my expertise with real concentration to produce things of hard to replicate value. That's going to give you the career capital. That's going to give you all the autonomy, the mastery, the control more generally over your career. So we get to the types of ideas I talk about here and so good they can't ignore you. So how do you get from entry level to a place in which you actually have a chance to do deep work? Well, what's going to matter at this point is, first of all, that you're dependable. So the stuff you say you're going to do gets done. It gets done when you say it's going to get done.

And if it's going to take longer, you let people know in advance, I said Wednesday, it's going to be Thursday, and then you deliver on Thursday. So you're dependable. They know that things aren't going to fall to the cracks when it gets onto your plate. Two, deliver consistently at a high quality. So they trust that, okay, when we give this person a task to do, we don't have to remind them. We don't have to worry that they forgot about it. It will get done.

And when it gets done, it's going to get done well. They're going to think it through. And even if we left out some details, they'll figure out those details. They'll do it at a high level. Those two things. Consistent quality and dependability. That is the foundation I usually advise to people in their first jobs that you want to lay before anything else. And to lay that foundation, this is where it's very useful that you have just the mechanics of organizing your day, organizing your obligations.

having those mechanics really solidly configured right off the bat. Great task capture. You have a task board. Everything's on there. You see what it is. Your time block planning your days to the extent that's possible. So you're making the most of your time. You're weekly planning so things don't get forgotten.

You can look at the week ahead of you. You can see pitfalls coming up. You can see issues that maybe need to be resolved. So you can get proactively out in front of those and say, you know, you asked me to do this on Tuesday morning, but also we have the staff meeting. Is that going to be a problem? and you have some notion of a quarterly plan that helps you shape your bigger picture efforts, even if your bigger picture efforts are small at first when you're just entry level.

So get those mechanics a good productivity in place. Use those mechanics to be dependable. Use those mechanics to be consistent, to have consistent quality. You will move up fast if you're able to do that. Those are two properties that are heavily in demand, people who are able to satisfy those properties themselves are looked highly upon. People want them to work with them on their initiatives, on their projects. They will pull you up to fill in new slots that open.

So it might be frustrating now that you're not doing a lot of deep work. And I think you're right to be frustrated in the sense that that's important. You want to get to a place with that deep work as possible. Do those two things and you will soon be in a position where now there's more than enough things where deep work is going to make a difference. And that's ultimately where you want to get. Hi, Cal, my name is Temur. I am a software engineer by profession, and I've been following your books for quite a long time now.

My question is regarding your time block planner. I was wondering if you are going to update to a new version with a spiral binding because I read a lot of reviews on Amazon that the spiral binding would make it even more. easy to use. Do you have more updates coming to your time block planner soon? Please keep me updated. Thank you. Good question, timely question.

So we have a collection of changes that we are preparing for the next generation of time block planners. Full life flat or significantly improved life flat is part of it. There's some changes I'm doing to the actual configuration of the page. inside the planner that's going to give us more days worth of planning without having to actually make the planner much thicker. There's a few other things, too, that are on this list. I've been working with my publisher on to get ready for the next generation of time block planners.

Here is the main thing that stands between us right now and generation two of the time block planners is that we printed a lot of the first generation. We printed tens of thousands of copies of this planner. also sold tens of thousands of copies of the planner, so it's good. We're catching up to the supply, but we can't put out a new generation of the planner until we basically have moved through the first generation that we've already printed. So what I want to try to tell people who are using a time block planner now, this thing will continually be updated. The slowest update is going to be this first one because the first printing of anything is going to be the biggest. After this first printing, printings will probably be smaller. So, We can get changes into the pipeline quicker, but you are not investing when you buy this planner, when you start doing time block planning, you're not investing in the exact version of the planner you receive in the mail as being what you will be using from here on out. Over time, this planner will evolve based on feedback. So you're investing in a system. You're investing in a approach to managing your time, not just a physical product.

Because once you fill that one planner, you get another one, and then you get another one. And then the next one might be different because we're going to continue to. evolve. So I do like to tell people that every three months you're done with one pretty soon the next one you get might be different. So this seems very self-serving but it's true. The best thing you can do

to help introduce or accelerate improvements to the planner is actually to keep using the planner. So if you're using time block planning and maybe there's some changes you want to see, keep using time block planning because if everyone bought one

We get through six months more and everyone's bought two more. That's going to get us all the more quicker to the printing selling out so we can get the new changes into the pipeline. So again, I know that sounds really self-serving, but this is the bigger point I want to make is when you buy the time block planner. It's not the one thing you get. It is an investment in a new philosophy of scheduling. And if you don't know what we're talking about, we do have that website, timeblockplanner.com, which explains what time blocking is. We have a really nice video there that actually shows the planner in action, et cetera. So yes, changes are coming.

After those changes, there'll be more. And after those, there will, I'm sure, be more. This will continue to evolve. Keep your feedback on this planner coming to me. And together, we are going to make the tools we use for this really effective mode of time management increasingly polished and increasingly useful. Hi, Carl. This is Fabio. I am a mechanical engineering professor from Brazil.

and I've been struggling how to balance teaching with research responsibilities. So I've wondered how do you apply deep work to your teaching responsibilities? How do you determine how well a class is prepared? How much do you dedicate to class preparation versus research? So if you could help me on that, I would appreciate. Thanks. Well, this is a perennial problem for academics and research institutions, just trying to figure out how to balance this teaching with the research

obligations that you have. I mean, I would say one of the big problems that people run into is that they spend too much time on the teaching. This is a real issue, I think, for new professors. They're worried about it. They're worried about teaching. And they give up whole days in elaborate prep and exercise construction. And some balance really is needed here.

So I'm a big believer, for example, when it comes to my teaching obligations, taking the activities of non-pedagogical import and making sure those are as low overhead as possible. I think a lot, for example, about the systems by which problem sets come in and get graded, the systems by which exams are written and looked at and graded. I have pretty well-developed systems I use with my TAs to try to, again, minimize overhead that is non-pedagogically important. I can then isolate the pedagogically important activities like lecture prep and make sure that gets the time it needs. I'm also, though, very systematic about where that time falls. So I just am thinking all the time about the footprint of teaching. You know, I want to control it. I want to minimize it where I can.

The stuff that's incredibly important, I want to be very routine about where it falls. So, for example, if I'm prepping a course, I'm going to do that work on the day I can. teach. It's going to be at the set time every day. This is when I do my prepping. I know I need about three hours, so I'll put aside three and a half hours, and this is where that time is. I just want to keep things really contained. When do I do problem sets and post those? Well, maybe that time is always right after class on this one day each week. So that's just where that happens. How do I want to go back and forth with my TAs on the grading? Let's get a system. Let's get it worked out where you pick up these problem sets automatically. You put them here when you're done

grading them. I put the notes over here so you can just grab them. So I'm looking to keep that footprint small. So you have to think a lot about the footprint of teaching. You got to keep it contained. You got to keep it reasonable. Get rid of the overhead you can and be very systematic about the activities that are really deep, the activities that really matter. All that being said, it's also just hard. It is a really hard balance. Academia is a really hard balance. It does not take much for the balance to get upended. For this one course that got added to my schedule that needs a new prep and we're having difficulties making the material work, suddenly everything's out of balance and your research

goes awry. Or you have your teaching imbalance, but then there's a service obligation that falls on your plate that it's just pressing the wrong buttons. It's requiring too many short meetings is breaking up your days and suddenly you're finding yourself having to stay up late to ride problem sets for your courses. It's really easy to get knocked out of balance. I got knocked out of balance during the pandemic. My computer science-centric research really got knocked off of its normal track,

and I'm still working to try to figure out where I want that to be and to bring it back onto that track. So these things are all very delicately balanced. So that's partially, I'm saying this partially just so you can go easy on yourself. This is hard. And two, so that you'll think really carefully about how you actually integrate all of the elements of being a professor into your life. the teaching goes, how much service you do and when you say no and how you organize that

service, where the research happens, what's key to the research, what's the key things that matter, let's make sure that's constantly happening, what is actually needed to get the papers you need written at the level of quality you needed at the pace you're needed. Be realistic about that and say, how can I build my life around making sure that's possible? All of this is complicated. I've talked before about how in general in these type of elite level knowledge work jobs. The amount of this is just left on the individual to somehow navigate, hey, we're just going to fire hose stuff at you. We're just going to fire hose obligations and standards at you and just try to figure it out. This can't possibly be the right way to

organize complicated work. At the very minimum, it generates a huge amount of anxiety and stress that does not have to be there. At the maximum, it creates all sort of unexpected inequities where certain people are better able to manage that self-managerial challenge. and others, and so they get a move way ahead. But do we really care in academia about your self-managerial capabilities? Not really. We care about how well you can teach and what you can produce. And so it's a really big issue.

I'm a professional organizer. I'm a professional analyzer of knowledge work. I have written very well-selling books on how to understand and figure out knowledge work. I write a calm about this for the New Yorker, and I struggle with it. So I'm just imagining people who haven't spent a decade thinking and writing about how to organize work. What it's like when you have all these different things coming at you and you're somehow just trying to figure it out. It really is an issue. So this is the bigger picture rant I want to give here, if you'll excuse a brief rant.

We are way too haphazard in how we approach doing this type of job. we just turn this into a free-for-all. Here's someone, here's their email address, here's their Slack address, here's how you can send them Google invites. And just let's rock and roll. Just if you need someone, bother someone, hey, this person's very responsive or organized. So let me ask them to work on this project. Oh, by the way, you need to meet this standard. We're going to evaluate you in a couple of years on your papers, produce.

Hey, can you grab this class over here? Figure it out. Manage your load. Figure out how and when to say no. organize all the information that goes with all these projects. Organize your complex schedule so that you can actually find time to get these things done. Figure out how to make this all fit into the other demands in your life, which differ wildly depending on who we're talking to. This is a 26-year-old single professor versus a professor who's 45 with four kids versus the professor whose parent is going through Alzheimer's and just moved into their basement apartment.

You guys just figure this all out. We're not going to think about it. It's just a free-for-all. Figure out how work's going to happen. This is incredibly difficult. I've said up before. I want to emphasize this point again, I think knowledge work should be much more structured.

I think cognitive load is not something that individual should manage. We should move towards pole systems. Okay, what do I want to work on next? It gets pulled onto your plate, and then you work on that until you're done. It should be much more sequential. There should be much more systemic thinking

into how we figure out what you should be working on, what comes next. The total number of things you work on at any one point should be much lower. There should be much more intellectual division of labor. this idea that just because an internet connected microprocessor equipped computer

means that everyone can do every little administrative task doesn't mean that we should just have everyone do every little administrative task that's a terrible way to use the brain. There are revolutions coming in what it means to work and knowledge work just like revolutions came through industrial work and figured out maybe we shouldn't just have a piecemeal system where we send people home with some wool and they make socks. We ended up with factories and it got very complicated,

complications are coming to knowledge work. I think the way we're doing it today is broken. The issue, just this narrow issue we're talking about the answer to this question is devilishly complex. And why do we want a professor having to spend 30% of his brain power figuring out how he's going to manage the time demands of 17 different things going on? I'd rather have you spend that 30% teaching a better class or producing a better research paper. So look, I don't have the full solution, but I'm thinking about this. I have a book concept, a slow productivity book concept that might touch on some of this. I'm going to continue to write about this in the New Yorker.

I'm going to continue to write about this on my newsletter. So I hear your pain. And I think we should all be thinking a little bit harder about how we alleviate it. All right. Well, that's all the time we have for today's episode. Thank you to everyone who sent in their listener calls. Thank you to Jesse for jumping on the mic here as well. Be back on Monday with the next full-length episode of the Deep Questions podcast.

and until then, as always, stay deep.